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Chapter 14: The High Middle Ages (1000-1300)

The Revival of Empire, Church, and Towns


Otto I and the Revival of the Empire
The Reviving Catholic Church
The First Crusades
Trade and the Growth of Towns (1100-1300)
Medieval Universities and Scholasticism
Society
The Order of Life
Medieval Women
Medieval Children
Politics
England and France: Hastings (1066) to Bouvines (1214)
The Hohenstaufen Empire (1152-1272)
The Rise of Russia France in the Thirteenth Century: The
Reign of Louis IX
The High Middle Ages in World Perspective

The high Middle Ages mark a period of political expansion and


consolidation and of intellectual flowering and synthesis. The noted
medievalist Joseph Strayer has called it the age that saw “the full
development of all the potentialities of medieval civilization.” (Western
History in the Middle Ages-A Short History, New York: Appleton-Century-
Crofts, 1955, pp. 9, 127) Some even argue that as far as the
development of Western institutions is concerned, this was a more
creative period than the later Italian Renaissance and the German
Reformation.
The high Middle Ages saw the borders of Western Europe largely
secured against foreign invaders. Although there was intermittent
Muslim aggression well into the sixteenth century, fear of assault from
without diminished. A striking change occurred in the late eleventh and
the twelfth century. Western Europe, which had for so long been the
prey of foreign powers, became through the Crusades and foreign trade
the feared hunter within both the Eastern and the Arab worlds.
During the high Middle Ages, ”national” monarchies emerged in France,
England, and Germany. Parliaments and popular assemblies
representing the interests of the nobility, the clergy, and the
townspeople also appeared at this time to secure local rights and
customs against the claims of the developing nationstates. The
foundations of modern representative institutions can be found in this
period.
The high Middle Ages saw a revolution in agriculture that increased both
food supplies and populations. This period witnessed a great revival of
trade and commerce, the rise of towns, and the emergence of a ”new
rich” merchant class, the ancestors of Modern capitalists. Urban culture
and education flourished through the recovery of the writings of the
ancient Greek philosophers, which was made possible by the revival of
Eastern trade and by way of Spanish contacts with Muslim intellectuals.
Unlike the dabbling in antiquity that Carolingian times experienced, the
twelfth century enjoyed a true renaissance of classical learning.

The high Middle Ages were also the time when the Latin or Western
church established itself as an authority independent of monarchical
secular government, thereby sowing the seeds of the distinctive
Western separation of Church and State. This occurred during the
Investiture Struggle of the late eleventh century and the twelfth
century. In this confrontation between popes and emperors, a reformed
papacy overcame its long subservience to the Carolingian and Ottoman
kings. The papacy won out, however, by becoming itself a monarchy
among the world’s emerging monarchies, thereby preparing the way for
still more dangerous confrontations between popes and emperors in the
later Middle Ages.

The Revival of Empire, Church, and Towns


Otto I and the Revival of the Empire

The fortunes of both the old empire and the papacy began to revive
when the Saxon Henry I (”the Fowler”; d. 936), the strongest of the
German dukes, became the first non-Frankish king of Germany in 918.
Henry rebuilt royal power by forcibly consolidating the duchies of
Swabia, Bavaria, Saxony, Pranconia, and Lotharingia. He secured
imperial borders by checking the invasions of the Hungarians and the
Danes. Although greatly reduced in size by comparison with
Charlemagne’s empire, Henry’s German kingdom still placed his son
and successor Otto I (936-973) in a strong territorial position.
The very able Otto maneuvered his own kin into positions of power in
Bavaria, Swabia, and Franconia. He refused to treat each duchy as an
independent hereditary dukedom, as was the trend among the nobility.
He rather dealt with each as a subordinate member of a unified
kingdom. In a truly imperial gesture in 951, Otto invaded Italy and
proclaimed himself its king. In 955, he won his most magnificent victory
when he defeated the Hungarians at Lechfeld, a feat comparable to
Charles Mattel’s earlier victory over the Saracens at Tours in 732. The
victory of Lechfeld secured German borders against new barbarian
attack, further unified the German duchies, and earned Otto the
welldeserved title ”the Great.”
As part of a careful rebuilding program, Otto, following the example of
his predecessors, enlisted the Church. Bishops and abbots, men who
possessed a sense of universal empire yet did not marry and found
competitive dynasties, were made royal princes and agents of the king.
Because these clergy, as royal bureaucrats, received great landholdings
and immunity from local counts and dukes, they also found such
vassalage to the king very attractive.
In 961, Otto, who had long aspired to the imperial crown, responded to
a call for help from Pope John XII (955-964). In recompense, Pope John
crowned Otto emperor on February 2, 962. At this time, Otto also
recognized the existence of the Papal States and proclaimed himself
their special protector. The Church was now more than ever under royal
control. Its bishops and abbots were Otto’s appointees and bureaucrats,
and the pope reigned in Rome only by the power of the emperor’s
sword. Pope John belatedly recognized the royal web in which the
church had become entangled. As a countermeasure, he joined Italian
opposition to the new emperor. This turnabout brought Otto’s swift
revenge. An ecclesiastical synod over which Otto personally presided
deposed Pope John and proclaimed that henceforth no pope could take
office without first swearing an oath of allegiance to the emperor. In
Otto I, Western Caesaropapism reached a peak, as popes ruled at the
emperor’s pleasure.
Otto had shifted the royal focus from Germany to Italy. His successors
became so preoccupied with running the affairs of Italy that their
German base began to disintegrate, sacrificed to imperial dreams. They
might have learned a lesson from the contemporary Capetian kings, the
successor dynasty to the Carolingians in France, who wisely mended
local fences and concentrated their limited resources on securing a tight
grip on their immediate royal domain, which was never neglected for
the sake of foreign adventure. The Ottonians, in contrast, reached far
beyond their grasp when they tried to subdue Italy. As the briefly
revived empire began to crumble in the first quarter of the eleventh
century, the Church, long unhappy with Carolingian and Ottoman
domination, prepared to declare its independence and exact its own
vengeance.

The Reviving Catholic Church


THE CLUNY REFORM MOVEMENT. During the late ninth and early tenth
centuries, the clergy had become tools of kings and magnates, and the
papacy a toy of Italian nobles. The Ottomans made bishops their servile
princes, and popes also served at their pleasure. A new day dawned for
the Church, however, thanks not only to the failing fortunes of the
empire but also to a new force for reform within the Church itself. In a
great monastery in Cluny in east-central France, a reform movement
appeared.
Since the fall of the Roman Empire; popular support for the Church had
been especially inspired by the example of the monks. Monasteries
provided an important alternative style of life for the religiously earnest
in an age when most people had very few options. The tenth and
eleventh centuries saw an unprecedented boom in their construction.
Monks remained the least secularized and most spiritual of the Church’s
clergy. Their cultural achievements were widely admired, their relics and
rituals were considered magical, and their high religious ideals and
sacrifices were imitated by the laity.
Cluny, the main source of the reform movement, was founded in 910 by
William the Pious, duke of Aquitaine. A Benedictine monastery devoted
to the strictest observance of Saint Benedict’s Rule for Monasteries, it
placed a special emphasis on liturgical purity. The Cluny reformers were
intent on maintaining a spiritual church. They absolutely rejected the
subservience of the clergy, especially that of the German bishops, to
royal authority. They taught that the pope in Rome was sole ruler over
all the clergy. The Cluny reformers further resented the transgression of
ascetic piety by ”secular” parish clergy, who maintained concubines in a
relationship akin to marriage. (Later, a distinction would be formalized
between the secular clergy who lived and ministered in the world
[saeculurn] and the regular clergy, monks and nuns withdrawn from the
world and living according to a special rule [regula])
The Cluny reformers resolved to free the clergy from both kings and
”wives,” to create an independent and chaste clergy. The Church alone
was to be the clergy’s lord and spouse. The distinctive Western
separation of Church and State and the celibacy of the Catholic clergy,
both of which continue today, had their definitive origins in the Cluny
reform movement.
Cluny rapidly became a center from which reformers were dispatched to
monasteries throughout France and Italy. It grew to embrace almost
fifteen hundred dependent cloisters, each devoted to monastic and
Church reform. In the last half of the eleventh century, the Cluny
reformers reached the summit when the papacy embraced their
reforms.
In the late ninth and early tenth centuries, the movement inspired the
”Peace of God,” a series of Church decrees that attempted to lessen the
endemic warfare of medieval society by threatening excommunication
for all who, at any time, harmed such vulnerable groups as women,
peasants, merchants, and clergy. The Peace of God was subsequently
reinforced by proclamations of the ”Truce of God,” a Church order that
everyone must abstain from every form of violence and warfare during
a certain part of each week (eventually from Wednesday night to
Monday morning) and in all holy seasons.
Popes devoted to reforms like those urged by Cluny came to power
during the reign of Emperor Henry in (1039-1056). Pope Leo IX (1049-
1054) promoted regional synods in opposition to simony (that is, the
selling of spiritual things, such as Church offices) and clerical
concubinage. He also placed Cluniacs in key administrative posts in
Rome. During the turbulent minority of Henry Ill’s successor, Henry IV
(1056-1106), reform popes began to assert themselves more openly.
Pope Stephen IX (1057-1058) reigned without imperial ratification,
contrary to the earlier declaration of Otto. I. Pope Nicholas II (1059-
1061) took the unprecedented step of establishing a College of
Cardinals in 1059, and henceforth this body alone elected the pope.

HAY UNA IMAGEN:


A drawing of the famous Romanesque third abbey church of St. Peter of
the monastery of Cluny, France, built between 1080 and 1225, and
ultimately destroyed by war and demolished between 1805 and 1823
except for one tower. When built in the twelfth century it was the
largest church in Europe (555 feet long). For the next two centuries
Cluny’s clergy and scholars were the principal source of clerical reforms
and arguments for ecclesiastical independence from secular rulers.
[Giraudon]

THE INVESTITURE STRUGGLE: GREGORY VII AND HENRY IV. It was Pope
Gregory’ VII (1073-1085), a fierce advocate of Cluny’s reforms who had
entered the papal bureaucracy a quarter century earlier during the
pontificate of Leo IX, who put the Church’s declaration of independence
to the test. Cluniacs had repeatedly inveighed against simony. In 1075,
Pope Gregory condemned under penalty of excommunication the lay
investiture of clergy at any level. He had primarily in mind the
emperor’s wellestablished custom of installing bishops by presenting
them with the ring and staff that symbolized episcopal office. After
Gregory’s ruling, bishops no more than popes were to be the creations
of emperors. As popes were elected by the College of Cardinals and
were not raised up by kings or nobles, so bishops would henceforth be
installed in their offices by high ecclesiastical authority as empowered
by the pope and none other.
Gregory’s prohibition came as a jolt to royal authority. Since the days of
Otto I, emperors had routinely passed out bishoprics to favored clergy.
Bishops, who received royal estates, were the emperors’ appointees and
servants of the state. Henry IV’s Carolingian and Ottoman predecessors
had carefully nurtured the theocratic character of the empire in bouh
concept and administrative bureaucracy. The church and religion were
integral parts of government. Henry considered Gregory’s action a
direct challenge to his authority. The territorial princes, on the other
hand, ever tending away from the center and eager to see the emperor
weakened, were quick to see the advantages of Gregory’s ruling: if the
emperor did not have a bishop’s ear, then a territorial prince might. In
the hope of gaining an advantage over both the emperor and the clergy
in their territory, the princes fully supported Gregory’s edict.
The lines of battle were quickly drawn. Henry assembled his loyal
German bishops at Worms in January 1076 and had them proclaim their
independence from Gregory. Gregory promptly responded with the
Church’s heavy artillery; he excommunicated Henry and absolved all
Henry’s subjects from loyalty to him. The German princes were
delighted by this turn of events, and Henry found himself facing a
general revolt led by the duchy of Saxony. He had no recourse but to
come to terms with Gregory. In a famous scene, Henry prostrated
himself outside Gregory’s castle retreat at Canossa on January 25, 1077.
There he reportedly stood barefoot in the snow off and on for three days
before the pope absolved his royal penitent. Papal power had, at this
moment, reached its pinnacle. But heights are also for descending, and
Gregory’s grandeur, as he must surely have known when he pardoned
Henry and restored him to power, was very soon to fade.
The settlement of the investiture controversy came in 1122 with the
Concordat of Worms. Emperor Henry V (1106-1125) formally renounced
his power to invest bishops with ring and staff. In exchange, Pope
Calixtus 11 (1119-1.124) recognized the emperor’s right to be present
and to invest bishops with fiefs before or after their investment with
ring and staff by the Church. The old Church-State ”back scratching” in
this way continued, but now on very different terms. The clergy
received their offices and attendant religious powers solely from
ecclesiastical authority and no longer from kings and emperors. Rulers
continued to bestow lands and worldly goods on high clergy in the hope
of influencing them; the Concordat of Worms made the clergy more
independent but not necessarily less worldly.
The Gregorian party won the independence of the clergy at the price of
encouraging the divisiveness of the political forces within the empire.
The pope made himself strong by making imperial authority weak. In
the end, those who profited most from the investiture controversy were
the local princes.

HAY UN DOCUMENTO:
Pope Gregory VII Asserts the Power of the Pope
Church reformers of the high Middle Ages vigorously asserted the
power of the pope within the Church and his rights against emperors
and all others who might encroach on the papal sphere of jurisdiction.
Here is a statement of the basic principles of the Gregorian reformers,
known as the Ditatus Papae (”The Sayings of the Pope”), which is
attributed to Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085).

That the Roman Church was founded by God alone.


That the Roman Pontiff alone is rightly to be called universal.
That the Pope may depose the absent.
That for him alone it is lawful to enact new laws according to the needs
of the time, to assemble together new congregations, to make an abbey
of a canonry; and ... to divide a rich bishopric and unite the poor ones.
That he alone may use the imperial insignia.
That uhe Pope is the only one whose feet are to be kissed by all princes.
That his name alone is to be recited in churches.
That his title is unique in the world.
That he may depose emperors.
That he may transfer bishops, if necessary, from one See to another.
That no synod may be called a general one without his order.
That no chapter or book may be regarded as canonical without his
authority.
That no sentence of his may be retracted by any one; and that he, alone
of all, can retract it. That he himself may be judged by no one.
That the Roman Church has never erred, nor ever, by the witness of
Scripture, shall err to all eternity.
That the Pope may absolve subjects of unjust men from their fealty.

Church and State through the Centuries: A Collection of Historic


Documents, trans, and ed. by S. Z. Ehler and John B. Morrall (New York:
Biblo and Tannen, 1967), pp. 43-44.

The First Crusades


If an index of popular piety and support for the pope in the high Middle
Ages is needed, the Crusades amply provide it. What the Cluny reform
was to the clergy, the First Crusade to the Holy Land, proclaimed by
Pope Urban II at the Council of Clennont in France in
1095, was to the laity: an outlet for the heightened religious zeal of
what was Europe’s most religious century prior to the Protestant
Reformation. Actually, there had been an earlier Crusade of French
knights, who, inspired by Pope Alexander II, had attacked Muslims in
Spain in 1064. Unlike later Crusades, which were undertaken for
patently mercenary as well as religious motives, the early Crusades
were to a very high degree inspired by genuine religious piety and were
carefully orchestrated by the revived papacy. Participants in die First
Crusade to the Holy Land were promised a plenary indulgence should
they die in battle, that is, a complete remission of the penance required
of them for their mortal sins and hence release from suffering for them
in purgatory. But this spiritual reward was only part of the crusading
impulse. Other factors were the widespread popular respect for the
reformed papacy and the existence of a nobility newly strengthened by
the breakdown of imperial power and eager for military adventure.
These elements combined to make the First Crusade a rousing success.
The Eastern emperor had petitioned both Pope Gregory VII and Pope
Urban II for aid against advancing Muslim armies. The Western
Crusaders did not, however, assemble for the purpose of defending
Europe’s borders against aggression. They freely took the offensive to
rescue the holy city of Jerusalem which had been in non-Christian hands
since the seventh century-from the Seljuk Turks. To this end three great
armies -tens of thousands of Crusaders- gathered in France, Germany,
and Italy. Following different routes, they reassembled in Constantinople
in 1097. The convergence of these spirited soldiers on the Eastern
capital was a cultural shock that only deepened Eastern antipathy
toward the West. The weakened Eastern emperor, Alexis I, suspected
their motives, and the common people, who were forced to give them
room and board, hardly considered them Christian brothers in a
common cause -especially after Rome and Constantinople had
separated in 1054. Nonetheless, these fanatical Crusaders
accomplished what no Eastern army had ever been able to do. They
soundly defeated one Seljuk army after anodier in a steady advance
toward Jerusalem, which fell to them on July 15, 1099.
The victorious Crusaders divided the conquered territory into the feudal
states of Jerusalem, Edessa, and Antioch, which they allegedly held as
fiefs from the pope. Godfrey of Bouillon, leader of the FrenchGerman
army (and after him his brother Baldwin), ruled over the kingdom of
Jerusalem. However, the Crusaders remained only small islands within a
great sea of Muslims, who looked on the Western invaders as hardly
more than savages. Native persistence finally broke the Caisaders
around mid-century, and the forty-odd-year Latin presence in the East
began to crumble. Edessa fell to Muslim armies in 1144. A Second
Crusade, preached by the eminent Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153),
Christendom’s most powerful monastic leader, attempted a rescue, but
it met with dismal failure. In October 1187, Jerusalem itself was
reconquered by Saladin (1138-1193), king of Egypt and Syria, and, save
for a brief interlude in the thirteenth century, it remained thereafter in
Islamic hands until Modern times.
A Third Crusade in the twelfth century (1189-1192) attempted yet
another rescue, enlisting as its leaders the most powerful Western
rulers: Emperor Frederick Barbarossa; Richard the Lion-Hearted, king of
England; and Philip Augustus, king of France. But the Third Crusade
proved a tragicomic commentary on the passing of the original
crusading spirit. Frederick Barbarossa accidentally drowned in the
SaJeph River while en route to the Holy Land. Richard the LionHearted
and Philip Augustus reached the outskirts of Jerusalem, but their intense
personal rivalry shattered the Crusaders’ unity and chances of victory.
Philip Augustus returned to France and.made war on English continental
territories, and Richard fell captive to the Emperor Henry VI as he was
returning to England. (Henry VI suspected Richard of plotting against
him with Henry’s mortal enemy, Henry the Lion, the duke of Saxony,
who happened also to be Richard’s brotherin-law.) The English were
forced to pay a handsome ransom for their king’s release. Popular
resentment of taxes for this ransom became part of the background of
the revolt against the English monarchy that led to the royal recognition
of Magna Carta in 1215.
The long-term achievement of the first three Crusades had little to do
with their original purpose. Politically and religiously, they were a
failure, and the Holy Land reverted as firmly as ever to Muslim hands.
These Crusades were more important for the way they stimulated
Western trade with the East. The merchants of Venice, Pisa, and Genoa
followed the Crusader’s cross to lucrative new markets. The need to
resupply the new Christian settlements in the Near East not only
reopened old trade routes that had long been closed by Arab
domination of the Mediterranean but also established new ones. It is a
commentary on both the degeneration of the original intent of the
Crusades and their true historical importance that the Fourth Caisade
(1202-1204) became an enterprising commercial venture manipulated
by the Venetians.

HAY UN MAPA:
MAP 14-1 THE EARLY CRUSADES Routes and several leaders of the
crusades during the first centwy of the movement. Indicated names of
the great nobles of the First Crusade do not exhaust the list. The even
showier array of monarchs of the Second and Third still left the
crusades, on balance, ineffective in achieving their ostensible goals.

HAY UNA IMAGEN:


The ”Castle of the Knights” (Krak-des-Chevaliers), the most magnificent
of the many crusader castles built in the Holy Land in the twelfth and
thiiteenth centuries and whose ruins remain in modern Syria, Lebanon,
and Jordan. It is situated in northern Syria a few miles from the
Lebanese border. Its defense consisted of two massive walls, one
overhanging the other, divided by a great moat. The Muslims of the
same period used very similar military architecture. [Arab Information
Center, New York.]

HAY UNA IMAGEN:


The Cathedral of Pisa, Italy, built in the second half of the eleventh
century. Nearby is the cathedral bell cower of 1174 -the ”leaning Tower
of Pisa”- which has settled alarmingly out of line.[Italian Government
Travel Office, New York.]

Trade and the Growth of Towns (1100-1300)

During the centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire,


Western Europe became a closed and predominantly agricultural
society, with small international commerce and even less urban culture.
The great seaports of Italy were the exceptions. Venice, Pisa, and Genoa
continued to trade actively with Constantinople and throughout the
eastern Mediterranean, including Palestine, Syria, and Egypt, during the
Middle Ages. The Venetians, Europe’s most sober businessmen,
jealously guarded their Eastern trade, attacking Western Christian
competitors as quickly as Muslim predators. The latter were largely
subdued by the success of the First Crusade, which proved a trade
bonanza for Italian cities as the Mediterranean was opened to greater
Western shipping. Venice, Pisa, and Genoa maintained major trading
posts throughout die Mediterranean by the twelfth century. (See Map
14-2.)

THE NEW MERCHANT CLASS. The Western commercial revival attendant


on these events repopulated the urban centers of the old Roman Empire
and gave birth to new industries. Trade put both money and ideas into
circulation. New riches, or the prospect of them, improved living
conditions, raised hopes, and increased populations. In the twelfth
century, Western Europe became a ”boom-town.” Among the most
interesting creations were the traders themselves, who formed a new,
distinctive social class. These prosperous merchants did not, as might
first be suspected, spring from the landed nobility. They were, to the con
trary, poor, landless adventurers who had absolutely nothing to lose
and everything to gain by the risks of foreign trade. For mutual
protection, they traveled together in great armed caravans, buying their
products as cheaply as possible at the source and selling them as dearly
as possible in Western marketplaces. They have been called the first
Western capitalists, inspired by profit and devoted to little more than
amassing fortunes. But their very greed and daring laid the foundations
for Western urban life as we have come to know it today.

Although in power, wealth, and privilege the great merchants were


destined to join and eventually eclipse the landed aristocracy, they were
initially misfits in traditional medieval society. They were freemen, often
possessed of great wealth, yet they neither owned land nor tilled the
soil. They did not value land and farming but were persons of liquid
wealth constantly on the move. Aristocrats and clergy looked down on
them as degenerates, and the commoners viewed them with suspicion.
They were intruders within medieval society, a new breed who did not
fit into the neat hierarchy of clergy, nobility, and serfs.
Merchants fanned out from the great Flemish and Italian trading
centers: Bruges, Ghent, Venice, Pisa, Genoa, Florence. Wherever they
settled in large numbers, they lobbied for the degree of freedom
necessary for successful commerce, opposing tolls, tariffs, and other
petty restrictions that discouraged the flow of trade. This activity
brought them initially into conflict with the norms of static agricultural
society. But as they demonstrated the many advantages of vigorous
trade, the merchants progressively won their case. They not only
remodeled city government to favor their new industries and the free
flow of trade but also imparted to the cities an aura of importance
unknown during previous centuries. By the late Middle Ages, cities
commonly saw themselves as miniature states, even self-contained
Christendoms.
As they grew and became prosperous, medieval cities also became very
jealous of their good fortune. They took every measure to protect skilled
industries, to expand trade, and to prevent competition from the
surrounding countryside. Government remained in the hands of the rich
and the few-patricians, grandi, the ”old rich” -although wealthy
merchants, aspiring to the noble style of life, increasingly found their
way into the inner circles of government, as money proved early that it
could talk. By the thirteenth century, city councils, operating on the
basis of aristocratic constitutions and composed of patricians and
wealthy merchantsthe old rich and the new rich-internally controlled city
life. These oligarchies were increasingly confronted by small artisans,
who demanded improved living conditions and a role in making policy.
Skilled artisans formed the far greater part of the new burgher class and
organized to express their will through powerful corporations or craft
guilds. These were exclusive organizations for the various skilled trades;
-they set
standards, certified craftsmen, and worked to enhance the economic
well- being and political influence of their members. The high and late
Middle Ages also saw a deepening conflict between craft masters, who
were determined to keep their numbers at an absolute minimum, and
journeymen, who found themselves frozen at the lower levels of their
trade. The self-protectiveness and internal conflicts of medieval cities
did not, however, prevent them from forming larger trade associations,
such as the famous German Hanseatic League, or Hansa, which kept
Baltic trade a German monopoly well into the fifteenth century.

HAY UN MAPA:
MAP 14-2 MEDIEVAL TRADE ROUTES AND REGIONAL PRODUCTS
Medieval trade in the West was not of the same intensity nor of the
same geographical breadth in different periods. The map shows some
of the channels that came to be used in interregional commerce. Labels
tell pan of what was carried in that commerce.

CHANGES IN SOCIETY. The rise of a merchant class caused an important


crack in the old social order. New-rich merchants, a class originally
sprung from ordinary, landless people, broke into the aristocracy, and in
doing so, they drew behind them the leadership of the new artisan class
created by the urban industries that had grown up in the wake of
growth of trade. In the late Middle Ages, the ”middle classes” would
firmly establish themselves. . Although from one perspective medieval
towns were overly self-protective and ”egoistic,” they also became a
force for innovation and change beyond their walls. This fact is all the
more remarkable when it is remembered that towns at this time
contained hardly more than 5 per cent of the population. Townspeople
became a major force in the breakup of feudal society, aiding both kings
and the peasantry at the expense of the landed nobility. Generally
speaking, towns and kings tended to ally themselves against the great
feudal lords. A notable exception may be seen in England, where the
towns joined the barons against the oppressive monarchy of King John
(1199-1216) and became a part of the parliamentary opposition.
Townspeople generally, however, found their autonomy better
preserved by having one distant master rather than several nearer and
factious overlords. Kings, in turn, counted on the liquid wealth and
administrative skills of the town-dwellers, who began to replace the
clergy and the nobility in the royal bureaucracy. Urban money made it
possible for kings to hire mercenary armies and thereby to decrease
their dependence on the noble cavalry -an important step in the
consolidation of territories divided for centuries by feudal allegiances
and customs.
From the burgher ranks, kings drew the skilled lawyers who began the
long process of replacing feudal custom with centralized Roman law,
and towns also often had powerful militias that could be enlisted in royal
service. Kings, in return, gave towns political recognition and
guaranteed their constitutions (in formal charters) against territorial
magnates. This was more easily done in the stronger coastal towns man
in interior areas, where urban life remained less vigorous and territorial
power was on the rise. In France, towns became integrated into the
royal government. In Germany and Austria, by contrast, towns fell under
ever tighter control by territorial princes. In Italy, towns uniquely grew
to absorb their surrounding territory, becoming city-states.
Towns also aided the peasantry, to the detriment of the landed nobility.
A popular maxim of the time in German cities was: Stadtluft macht
frei-”City air sets one free.” Cities passed legislation making serfs who
spent a year and a day within their walls freemen. New urban industries
provided lucky peasants vocations alternative to farming. The new
money economy made it possible for serfs or their urban patrons to buy
their freedom from feudal services and rents as the latter became
translatable into direct money payments. A serf or his patron could
simply buy up the ”contract.” The growth of a free peasantry became
especially evident in die thirteenth century.
All of this worked against the landed nobility. As urban trade and
industries put more money into circulation, its value decreased
(inflation). The great landowners, whose wealth was static, found
themselves confronted, on the one hand, by serfs who longed to flee to
the city and, on the other, by rising prices. They were losing their cheap
labor supply and facing diminished productivity; at the same time, they
had to pay more for their accustomed style of life. The nobility were not
disciplined people, and many fell prey to money-wise urban merchants,
who beat them out of their landed wealth.
The new urban economy worked, then, to free both kings and peasants
from dependence on feudal lords, although this was a long and complex
process. As royal authority became centralized and kings were able to
hire mercenary soldiers, the noble cavalry became militarily
obsolescent, at most a minor part of the king’s armed forces. And as
towns and urban industries grew, attracting serfs from the farms, the
nobility gradually lost its once all-powerful economic base. The long-
term consequence: a strengthening of monarchy.

HAY UN DOCUMENTO:
The English Nobility Imposes Restraints on King John
The gradual building of a sound English constitutional system in the
Middle Ages was in danger of going awry if a monarch overstepped the
fine line dividing necessaiy strength from outright despotism. The
danger became acute under the rule of King John. The English nobility,
therefore, forced the king’s recognition of Magna Carta (1215), which
reaffirmed the traditional rights and personal liberties of free men
against royal authority. The document has remained enshrined in
English law.

A free man shall not be fined for a small offense, except in proportion to
the gravity of the offense: and for a great offense he shall be fined in
proportion to the magnitude of the offense, saving his freehold; and a
merchant in the same way, saving his merchandise; and the villein shall
be fined in the same way, saving his wainage, if he shall be at our (i.e.,
the king’s) mercy; and none of the above fines shall be imposed except
by the oaths of honest men of the neighborhood. . . .
No constable or other bailiff of ours (i.e., the king) shall take anyone’s
grain or other chattels without immediately paying for them in money,
unless he is able to obtain a postponement at the good will of the seller.
No constable shall require any knight to give money in place of his ward
of a castle (i.e., standing guard) if he is willing to furnish that ward in his
own person, or through another honest man if he himself is not able to
do it for a reasonable cause; and if we shall lead or send him into the
army he shall be free from ward in proportion to the amount of time
which he has been in the army through us.
No sheriff or bailiff of ours [i.e., the king], or any one else, shall take
horses or wagons of any free man, for carrying purposes, except on the
permission of that free man.
Neither we nor our bailiffs will take the wood of another man for castles,
or for any tiling else which we are doing, except by the permission of
him to whom the wood belongs. . . .
No free man shall be taken, or imprisoned, or dispossessed, or
outlawed, or banished, or in any way injured, nor will we go upon him,
nor send upon him, except by the legal judgment of his peers, or by the
law of the land.
To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay, right or justice.

James Harvey Robinson (ed.), Readings in European History, Vol. 1


(Boston: Atheneaum, 1904), pp. 236-237.

HAY UNA IMAGEN:


The fortified city of Carcassonne in southern France, whose defenses
date from the period 1240-1285, during the reigns of Louis IX and Philip
the Bold. Note the protective walls and towers. [Bildarchiv Foto
Marburg.]

Medieval Universities and Scholasticism


Thanks to Spanish Muslim scholars, the logical works of Aristotle, the
writings of Euclid and Ptolemy, the basic works of Greek physicians and
Arab mathematicians, and the larger texts of Roman law became
available to Western scholars in the early twelfth century. Muslim
scholars preserved these works, translated portions of the Greek ones
into Latin, and wrote extensive, thought-provoking commentaries on
ancient texts. This renaissance of ancient knowledge, in turn, provided
the occasion for the rise of universities.

BOLOGNA AND PARIS. The first important Western university was in


Bologna. It received its formal grant of rights and privileges from the
emperor Frederick Barbarossa in 1158. University members, like clergy,
were granted royal immunity from local jurisdiction and were viewed by
local townspeople as a group apart. In Bologna, we find the first formal
organizations of students and professors and the first degree programs
-the institutional foundations of the modern university.
The ”university” was at first simply a program of study that gave the
student a license to teach others. Originally, the term university meant
no more than a group or corporation of individuals who were united by
common self-interest and for mutual protection. As the local
townspeople viewed both masters and students as foreigners without
civil rights, such a union was necessary. It followed the model of a
medieval trade guild. Bolognese students formed such a bloc in order to
guarantee fair rents and prices from the townspeople and regular and
high-quality teaching from their professors. Price gouging by
townspeople was met with the threat to move the university to another
town -a threat that could easily be carried out because the university at
this time was not a great, fixed physical plant. Professors who failed to
meet student expectations were boycotted. The mobility of the first
universities gave them a unique independence.
Professors also formed protective associations and established
procedures and standards for certification to teach within their ranks.
The first academic degree was a certificate (licentia docendi) given by
the professors’ guild, which granted graduates in the liberal arts
program or in the higher professional sciences ojf medicine, dieology,
and the law ”the right to teach anywhere” (ius ubique docendi).
Bologna was distinguished as the center for the revival of Roman law.
From the seventh to the eleventh centuries, only the most rudimentary
manuals of Roman law were available to be circulated. With the growth
of trade and towns in the late eleventh century, Western scholars came
into contact with the larger and more important parts of the Roman
Corpus Juris Civilis of Justinian. The study and dissemination of this new
material was directed by Irnerius (fl. early twelfth century). He and his
students made authoritative commentaries or glosses on individual laws
following their broad knowledge of the Corpus Juris. Around 1140, a
monk named Gratian, also a resident of Bologna, created the standard
legal text in church or canon law, the Concordance of Discordant
Canons, known more commonly as Gratian’s Decretum.
As Bologna provided the model for southern European universities and
the study of law, Paris became the model for northern Europe and the
study of theology. Oxford, Cambridge, and, much later, Heidelberg were
among Paris’s imitators. All these universities required a foundation in
the liberal arts for further study in the higher sciences of medicine,
theology, and law. The arts program consisted of the trivium (grammar,
rhetoric, and logic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry,
astronomy, and music). Before the emergence of the universities, the
liberal arts had been taught in the cathedral and monastery schools,
that is, schools attached to cathedrals or monasteries for the purpose of
training clergy. The most famous of the cathedral schools were those of
Rheims and Chartres.
The University of Paris grew institutionally out of the cathedral school of
Notre Dame, receiving its charter in 1200 from King Philip Augustus and
Pope Innocent III. Papal sanction and regulations, among them the right
of the faculty to strike, were issued in 1231 in the bull Parens
scientiarum and gave the university freedom from local church control.
At this time, the University of Paris consisted of independent faculties of
arts, canon law, medicine, and theology, with the masters of arts, who
were grouped together in four national factions (French, Norman,
English-German, and Picard), the dominant faculty.
At Paris, the college system originated. At first, colleges were no more
than hospices providing room and board for poor students. But the
educational life of the university rapidly expanded into these fixed
buildings and began to thrive on their sure endowments. In Paris, the
most famous college was the Sorbonne, founded around 1257 by Robert
de Sorbon, chaplain to the king, for the purpose of educating advanced
theological students. In Oxford and Cambridge, the colleges became the
basic unit of student life, indistinguishable from the university. By the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, colleges had tied the universities to
physical plants and fixed foundations, restricting their previous
autonomy and freedom of movement.

THE CURRICULUM. Before the twelfth century the education available


within the cathedral and monastic schools was quite limited. Students
learned grammar, rhetoric, and elementary geometry and astronomy.
They used the Latin grammars of Donatus and Priscian and studied
Saint Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine, Cassiodorus’ On Divine and
Secular Learning, and the various writings of Boethius (d. 524). Boethius
was important for instruction in arithmetic and music and especially for
the transmission of the small body of Aristotle’s logical works known
before the twelfth century. After the textual finds of the
early twelfth century, Western scholars had the whole of Aristode’s
logic, the astronomy of Ptolemy, the writings of Euclid, and many Latin
classics. By the midthirteenth century the ethical, physical, and
metaphysical writings of Aristotle were in circulation in the West.
In the high Middle Ages the learning process was very basic. The
student wrote commentaries on authoritative texts, especially those of
Aristotle. The teachers encouraged their students not to strive
independently for undiscovered truth, but to organize and harmonize
the accepted truths of tradition. The basic assumption was that truth
already existed. It had only to be organized and elucidated. Such
conviction made logic and dialectic supreme within the liberal arts.
The Scholastic program of study, based on logic and dialectic, reigned
supreme in all the faculties-in law and medicine as well as in philosophy
and theology. Scholasticism was a peculiar method of study. The student
read the traditional authorities in his field, formed short summaries of
their teaching, disputed it by elaborating arguments pro and con, and
then drew his own modest conclusions. The twelfth century saw the rise
of the ”summa,” a summary of all that was known about a topic, and
works whose sole purpose was to conciliate traditional authorities.

HAY UN DOCUMENTO:
Bishop Stephen Complainsabout the New Scholastic
Learning
Scholasticism involved an intellectual, learned approach to religion and
its doctrines rather than simple, uncritical piety. Many saw in it a threat
to the study of the Bible and the Church Fathers, as doctrines that
should simply be believed and revered were rationally dissected for
their logical meaning by allegedly presumptuous and none-too-well-
trained youths. Here is a particularly graphic description of the threat,
replete with classical allusion, as perceived by Stephen, Bishop
ofToumai, in a letter to the pope written between 1192 and 1203.
The studies of sacred letters among us are fallen into the workshop of
confusion, while both disciples applaud novelties alone and masters
watch out for glory rather than learning. They everywhere compose new
and recent summulae [litde summaries] and commentaries, by which
they attract, detain, and deceive their hearers, as if the works of the
holy fathers were not still sufficient, who, we read, expounded Holy
Scripture in the same spirit in which we believe the apostles and
prophets composed it. They prepare strange and exotic courses for their
banquet, when at the nuptials of the son of the king of Taurus his own
flesh and blood are killed and all prepared, and the wedding guests
have only to take and eat what is set before them. Contrary to the
sacred canons there is public disputation over the incomprehensible
deity; concerning the incarnation of the Word, verbose flesh and blood
irreverently litigate. The indivisible Trinity is cut up and wrangled over ...
so that now there are as many errors as doctors, as many scandals as
classrooms, as many blasphemies as squares. . . . Faculties called liberal
having lost their pristine liberty are sunk in such servitude that
adolescents with long hair impudently usurp their professorships, and
beardless youths sit in the seat of their seniors, and those who don’t yet
know how to be disciples strive to be named masters. And they write
their summulae moistened with drool and dribble but unseasoned vyith
the salt of philosophers. Omitting the rules of the arts and discarding
the authentic books of the artificers, they seize the flies of empty words
in their sophisms like the claws of spiders. Philosophy cries out that her
garments are torn and disordered and, modestly concealing her nudity
by a few specific tatters, neither is consulted nor consoles as of old. All
these things, father, call for the hand of apostolic correction...

Lynn Thorndike, University Records and Life in the Middle Ages (New
York: Octagon Books, 1971), pp. 22-24.

Society
The Order of Life
Four basic social groups were distinguished in the Middle Ages: those
who fought (the landed nobility), those who prayed (the clergy), those
who labored (the peasantry), and, after the revival of towns in the
eleventh century, those who traded and manufactured (the
townspeople). It would be false to view each of these groups as closed
and homogeneous. Throughout medieval society, like tended to be
attracted to like regardless of social grouping. Barons, archbishops, rich
fanners, and successful merchants had far more in
common with each other than they did with the middle and lower strata
of their various professions.
NOBLES. As a distinctive social group, all noblemen did not begin simply
as great men with large hereditary lands. Many rose from the ranks of
feudal vassals or warrior knights. The successful vassal attained a
special social and legal status based on his landed wealth (accumulated
fiefs), his exercise of authority over others, and his distinctive social
customsall of which set him apart from others in medieval society. By
the late Middle Ages there had evolved a distinguishable higher and
lower nobility living in both town and country. The higher were the great
landowners and territorial magnates; the lower were petty landlords,
descendants from minor knights, new-rich merchants who could buy
country estates, and wealthy farmers patiently risen from ancestral
serfdom.
It was a special mark of the nobility that they lived on the labor of
others. Basically lord of manors, the nobility of the early and high
Middle Ages neither tilled the soil like the peasantry nor engaged in the
commerce of merchants-activities considered beneath their dignity. The
nobleman resided in a country mansion or, if he were particularly
wealthy, a castle. He was drawn to the countryside as much by personal
preference as by the fact that his fiefs were usually rural manors. Arms
were his profession; the nobleman’s sole occupation and reason for
living was waging war. His fief provided the means to acquire the
expensive military equipment that his rank required, and he maintained
his enviable position as he had gained it, by fighting for his chief.
The nobility accordingly celebrated the physical strength, courage, and
constant activity of warfare. Warring gave them both new riches and an
opportunity to gain honor and glory. Knights were paid a share in the
plunder of victory, and in time of war everything became fair game.
Special war wagons, designed for the collection and transport of booty,
followed them into battle. Periods of peace were greeted with great
sadness, as they meant economic stagnation and boredom. Whereas
the peasants and the townspeople counted on peace as the condition of
their occupational success, the nobility despised it as unnatural to their
profession. They looked down on the peasantry as cowards who ran and
hid in time of war. Urban merchants, who amassed wealth by business
methods strange to feudal society, were held in equal contempt, which
increased as the affluence and political power of the townspeople grew.
The nobility possessed as strong a sense of superiority over these
”unwariike” people as the clergy did over the general run of laity.
The nobleman nurtured his sense of distinctiveness within medieval
society by the chivalric ritual of dubbing to knighthood, a ceremonial
entrance into the noble class that became almost a religious sacrament.
The ceremony was preceded by a bath of purification, confession,
communion, and a prayer vigil. Thereafter the priest blessed the
knight’s standard, lance, and sword. As prayers were chanted, the priest
girded the knight with his sword and presented him his shield, enlisting
him as much in the defense of the church as in the service of his lord.
Dubbing raised the nobleman to a state as sacred in his sphere as
clerical ordination made the priest in his. This comparison is quite
legitimate. The clergy and the nobility were medieval society’s
privileged estates. The appointment of noblemen to high ecclesiastical
office and their eager participation in the church’s Crusades had strong
ideological and social underpinnings as well as economic and political
motives.
In peacetime, the nobility had two favorite amusements: hunting and
tournaments. Because of the threat to towns and villages posed by wild
animals, the great hunts actually aided the physical security of the
ordinary people, while occupying the restless noblemen. However,
where they could, noblemen progressively monopolized the rights to
game, forbidding the commoners from hunting in the ”lord’s” forests.
This practice built resentment among the common people to the level of
revolt. Free game, fishing, and access to wood were basic demands in
the petitions of grievance and the revolts of the peasantry throughout
the high and later Middle Ages.
From the repeated assemblies in the courts of barons and kings, set
codes of social conduct or ”courtesy” developed in noble circles. With
the French leading the way, mannered behavior and court etiquette
became almost as important as battlefield expertise. Knights became
literate gentlemen, and lyric poets sang and moralized at court. The
cultivation of a code of behavior and a special literature to eulogize it
was not unrelated to problems within the social life of the nobility.
Noblemen were notorious philanderers; their illegitimate children
mingled openly with their legitimate offspring in their houses. The
advent of courtesy was, in part, an effort to reform this situation.
Although the poetry of courtly love was sprinkled with frank eroticism
and the beloved in these epics were married women pursued by those
to whom they were not married, the love recommended by the poet was
usually love at a distance, unconsummated by sexual intercourse. It was
love without touching, a kind of sex without physical sex, and only as
such was it considered ennobling. Court poets depicted those who did
carnally consummate their illicit love as reaping at least as much
suffering as joy from it.
By the fourteenth century, several factors forced the landed nobility into
a steep economic and political decline from which it never recovered.
These were the great population losses of the fourteenth century
brought on by the Great Plague; the changes in military tactics
occasioned by the use of infantry and heavy artillery during the
Hundred Years’ War; and the alliance of the wealthy towns with the king.
Generally, one can speak of a waning of the landed nobility after the
fourteenth century. Thereafter, the effective possession of land and
wealth counted far more than parentage and family tree as qualification
for entrance into the highest social class.
HAY UNA IMAGEN:
A miniature from the Codex Manesse showing lords tilting as their ladies
”ooh” and ”aah.” [Universitatsbibliothek, Heidelberg.]

CLERGY. Unlike the nobility and the peasantry, the clergy was an open
estate. Although clerical ranks reflected the social classes from which
the clergy came and a definite clerical hierarchy formed, one was still a
cleric by religious training and ordination, not by the circumstances of
birth or military prowess. There were two basic types of clerical
vocation: the regular and the secular clergy. The former were the orders
of monks, who lived according to a special ascetic rule (regida) in
cloisters separated from the world. They were the spiritual elite among
the clergy, and theirs was not a way of life lightly entered. Canon law
required that one be at least twenty-one years of age before making a
final profession of the monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and
obedience. Their personal sacrifices and high religious ideals made the
monks much respected in high medieval society.
Although many monks (and also nuns, who increasingly embraced the
vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity without a clerical rank)
secluded themselves altogether, the regular clergy were never
completely cut off from the secular world. They maintained frequent
contact with the laity through such charitable activities as feeding the
destitute and tending the sick, through liberal arts instruction in
monastic schools, through special pastoral commissions from the pope,
and as supplemental preachers and confessors in parish churches
during Lent and other peak religious seasons. It became the special
mark of the Dominican and Franciscan friars to live a common life
according to a special rule, and still to be active in worldly ministry.
Some monks, because of their learning and rhetorical skills, even rose
to prominence as secretaries and private confessors to kings and
queens.
The secular clergy were those who lived and worked directly among the
laity in the world (saeculum). They formed a vast hierarchy. There were
the high prelates -the wealthy cardinals, archbishops, and bishops, who
were drawn almost exclusively from the nobility-the urban priests, the
cathedral canons, and the court clerks; and, finally, the great mass of
poor parish priests, who were neither financially nor intellectually very
far above the common people they served (the basic educational
requirement was an ability to say the Mass). Until the Gregorian reform
in the eleventh century began to reverse the trend, parish priests lived
with women in a relationship akin to marriage, and their concubines and
children were accepted within the communities they served. Because of
their relative poverty, it was not unusual for priests to ”moonlight” as
teachers, artisans, or farmers, a practice also accepted and even
admired by their parishioners.
During the greater part of the Middle Ages, the clergy were the ”first
estate,” and theology was the queen of the sciences. How did the clergy
come into such prominence? It was basically popular reverence for the
clergy’s role as mediator between God and humanity that made this
superiority possible. The priest brought the very Son of God down to
earth when he celebrated the sacrament of the Eucharist; his absolution
released penitents from punishment for mortal sin. Theologians
elaborated the distinction between the clergy and the laity very much to
the clergy’s benefit. The belief in the superior status of the clergy
underlay the evolution of clerical privileges and immunities in both
person and property. As holy persons, the clergy could not be taxed by
secular rulers without special permission from the proper ecclesiastical
authorities. Clerical crimes fell under the jurisdiction of special
ecclesiastical courts, not the secular courts. Because churches and
monasteries were, deemed holy places, they too were free from secular
taxation and legal jurisdiction.
By the fourteenth century, townspeople came increasingly to resent the
special immunities of the clergy. They complained that it was not proper
for the clergy to have greater privileges yet far fewer responsibilities
than all others who lived within the town walls. Although the separation
of Church and State and the distinction between the clergy and the laity
have persisted into modern times, after the fifteenth century the clergy
ceased to be the superior class that they had been for so much of the
Middle Ages.

HAY UNA IMAGEN:


The Stigmatization of St. Francis (early fourteenth century) by Giotto. In
a vision on Mt. Alvema, St. Francis is said to have received the wounds
of Christ (the stigmata) in his own body and to have borne them for
almost two years before his death in 1226. The small lower panels show
Francis saving the church, receiving with his followers the Franciscans’
charter from the pope, and-characteristically-preaching to the birds.
[Musee du Louvre, Paris. Cliche des Musees Nationaitx.]

HAY UN DOCUMENTO:
Saint Francis of Assisi Sets Out His Religious Ideals
Saint Francis of Assisi (1182-1226) was the founder of the Franciscan
Order of friars. Here are some of his religious principles as stated in the
definitive Rule of the Order, approved by the pope in 1223; the rule
especially stresses the ideal of living in poverty’.

This is the rule and way of living of the Minorite brothers, namely, to
observe the holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, living in obedience,
without personal possessions, and in chastity. Brother Francis promises
obedience and reverence to our lord Pope Honorius, and to his
successors who canonically enter upon their office, and to the Roman
Church. And the other brothers shall be bound to obey Brother Francis
and his successors.
I firmly command all the brothers by no means to receive coin or
money, of themselves or through an intervening person. But for the
needs of die sick and for clothing the other brothers, the ministers alone
and the guardians shall provide through spiritual friends, as it may
seem to them that necessity demands, according to time, place, and the
coldness of the temperature. This one thing being always borne in mind,
that, as has been said, they receive neither coin nor money.
Those brothers to whom God has given the ability to labor shall do so
faithfully and devoutly, but in such manner that idleness, the enemy of
the soul, being averted, they may not extinguish the spirit of holy
prayer and devotion, to which other temporal things should be
subservient. As a reward, moreover, for dieir labor, they may receive for
themselves and their brodiers the necessities of life, but not coin or
money; and this humbly, as becomes the servants of God and the
followers of most holy poverty.
The brothers shall appropriate nothing to themselves, neither a house,
nor a place, nor anything; but as pilgrims and strangers in this world, in
poverty and humility serving God, they shall confidently go seeking for
alms. Nor need they be ashamed, for die Lord made Himself poor for us
in this world.

A Source Book of Medieval History, ed. by Frederic Austin Ogg (New


York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1972), pp. 375-376.

PEASANTS. The largest and lowest social group in medieval society was
the one on whose labor the welfare of all the others depended: the
agrarian peasantry. They lived on and worked the manors of the
nobility, the primitive cells of rural social life, and all were to one degree
or another dependent on their lords and considered their property. The
manor had originally been a plot of land within a village, ranging from
twelve to seventy-five acres in size, assigned to a certain member by a
settled tribe or clan. This member and his family became lords of the
land, and those who came to dwell there formed a smaller self-sufficient
community within a larger village community. In the early Middle Ages,
such a manor consisted of the dwellings of the lord and his family, the
cottages of the peasant workers, agricultural sheds, and fields. The
landowner or lord of the manor required a certain amount of produce
(grain, eggs, and the like) and a certain number of services from the
peasant families who came to dwell on and farm his land. The tenants
were free to divide the labor as they wished, and what goods remained
after the lord’s levies were met were their own. A powerful lord might
own many such manors, and kings later based their military and tax
assessments on the number of manors owned by a vassal landlord.
There were both servile and free manors. The tenants of the latter had
originally been freemen known as coloni, original inhabitants and petty
landowners who swapped their small possessions for a guarantee of
security from a more powerful lord, who came in this way to possess
their land. Unlike the pure serfdom of the servile manors, whose tenants
had no original claim to a part of the land, the tenancy obligations on
free manors tended to be limited and their rights more carefully
defined. Tenants of servile manors were by comparison far more
vulnerable to the whims of their landlords. These two types of manor
tended, however, to merge; the most common situation was the manor
on which tenants of greater and lesser degrees of servitude dwelt
together, their services to the lord defined by their personal status and
local custom.
Marc Bloch, the Modern authority on manorial society, has vividly
depicted the duties of tenancy:
On certain days the tenant brings the lord’s steward perhaps a few
small silver coins or, more often, sheaves of grain harvested on his
fields, chickens from his farm yard, cakes of wax from his beehives or
from the swarms of the neighboring forest. At other times he works on
the arable or the meadows of the demesne [the lord’s plot of land in the
manoral fields, between one third and one half of that available]. Or
else we find him carting casks of wine or sacks of grain on behalf of the
master to distant residences. His is the labour which repairs the walls or
moats of the castle. If the master has guests the peasant strips his own
bed to provide the necessary extra bedclothes. When the hunting
season comes round he feeds the pack. If war breaks out he does duty
as a footsoldier or orderly, under the leadership of the reeve of the
village.
Feudal Society, trans. by L. A. Manyon (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1968), p. 250.
The lord also had the right to subject his tenants to exactions known as
banalities. He could, for example, force them to breed their cows with
his bull, and to pay for the privilege, as well as to grind their corn in his
mill, bake their bread in his oven, make their wine in his wine press, buy
their beer from his brewery, and even surrender to him the tongues or
other choice parts of all animals slaughtered on his lands. He had the
right to levy small taxes at will.
Exploited as the serfs may appear to have been from a Modern point of
view, their status was far from outright chattel slavery. It was to the
lord’s advantage to keep his serfs healthy and happy; his welfare, like
theirs, depended on a successful harvest. Serfs had their own dwellings
and modest strips of land and lived by the produce of their own labor
and organization. They were permitted to market for their own profit
what surpluses might remain after the harvest. They were free to
choose their spouses within the local village, although the lord’s
permission was required if a wife or husband was sought from another
village. And serfs were able to pass a goodly portion of their property
(their dwellings and field strips) and worldly goods on to their children.
Two basic changes occurred in the evolution of the manor from the early
to the later Middle Ages. The first was the fragmentation of the manor
and the rise to dominance of the single-family unit. As the lords
parceled out their land to new tenants, their own plots became
progressively smaller. The increase in the number of tenants and the
decrease in the lord’s fields brought about a corresponding reduction in
the labor services exacted from the tenants. In France, by the reign of
Louis IX (1226-1270), only a few days a year were required, whereas in
the time of Charlemagne, peasants had worked the lord’s fields several
days a week. By the twelfth century, the manor was hopelessly
fragmented. As the single-family unit replaced the clan as the basic
nuclear group, assessments of goods and services fell on individual
fields and households, no longer on manors as a whole. Family farms
replaced manorial units. Children continued to live with their parents
after marriage, and several generations of one family could be found
within a single household, although nuclear families were also
cornmonplace. The peasants’ carefully nurtured communal life made
possible a family’s retention of its land and dwelling after the death of
the head of the household. In this way, land and property remained in
the possession of a single family from generation to generation.
The second change in the evolution of the manor was the translation of
feudal dues into money payments, a change made possible by the
revival of trade and the rise of the towns. This development, which was
completed by the thirteenth century, permitted serfs to hold their land
as rent-paying tenants and to overcome their servile status. Although
tenants thereby gained greater freedom, they were not necessarily
better off materially. Whereas servile workers had been able to count on
the benevolent assistance of their landlords in hard times, rent-paying
workers were left by and large to their own devices; their independence
caused some landlords to treat them with indifference and even
resentment.
Lands and properties that had been occupied by generations of
peasants and recognized as their own were always under the threat of
the lord’s claim to a prior right of inheritance and even outright
usurpation. As their demesnes declined, the lords were increasingly
tempted to encroach on such traditionally cornmon lands. The
peasantry fiercely resisted such efforts, instinctively clinging to the little
they had. In many regions, they successfully organized to win a role in
the choice of petty rural officials. By the midfourteenth century, a
declining nobility in England and France, faced with the ravages of the
great plague and the Hundred Years’ War, attempted to turn back the
historical clock by increasing taxes on the peasantry and passing laws
to restrict their migration into the cities. The peasantry responded with
armed revolts in the countryside. These revolts were rural equivalents
of the organization of late medieval cities in sworn communes to protect
their self-interests against rulers. The revolts of the agrarian peasantry,
like those of the urban proletariat, were brutally crushed. They stand
out at the end of the Middle Ages as violent testimony to the breakup of
medieval society. As growing national sentiment would break its political
unity and heretical movements would end its nominal religious oneness,
the revolts of the peasantry revealed the absence of medieval social
unity.

HAY UNA IMAGEN:


For hundreds of years and over a great pan of Europe the manor was
basic for much of the population. Despite regional variation and
changes that came with the revival of trade and growth of towns,
manors in the West had enough common features to justify this
modern, reconstruction of a characteristic example. Note the lord’s hall
and lands (demesne), the peasant village with common grounds and
services for the nine families (a-j) dwelling on this manor, the church
and its lands (glebe), peasant holdings in open fields, and areas for
woodcutting and hunting.. [The Granger Collection.]

HAY UNA IMAGEN:


A woodcut showing wild animals damaging peasant crops. One of the
greatest problems for peasants was how to protect their crops from
stags and deer. Forbidden by law from hunting then, the peasants built
fences and used clubs to drive the animals away. [Deutsche Fotothek,
Dresden.]

TOWNSPEOPLE. In the eleventh century, towns and cities held only


about 5 per cent of Western Europe’s population. Nonetheless, one
could find there the whole of medieval society: nobles visiting their
townhouses, peasants living or working within the walls, resident monks
and priests, university scholars, great merchants and poor journeymen,
pilgrims en route to shrines, and beggars passing through. By modern
comparison, the great majority of medieval towns were merely small
villages. Of some three thousand late medieval German towns, for
example, twenty-eight hundred had populations under 1,000 and only
fifteen had in excess of 10,000 inhabitants. Only London, Paris, and the
great merchant capitals of Italy-Florence, Venice, and Naples-
approached 100,000 by the fifteenth century.
Women appear to have slightly outnumbered men. War, the perils of
long-distance travel, and illnesses resulting from immoderation in food
and drink cornbined to reduce male ranks. The frequent remarriage of
widows, whose inheritances made them attractive mates, and the
church’s siphoning off of an already short supply of eligible bachelors
into monasteries contributed to the large number of unmarried women.
Those from the upper classes entered nunneries and beguinages, and
the very poor joined wandering bands of prostitutes. The great mass of
lower and middle strata married women worked as virtual partners in
their husbands’ trade or craft. It has been speculated that the fact that
unmarried women formed a large, unproductive surplus contributed to
the prejudice of late medieval society against them and made them the
more vulnerable targets of the great witch hunts of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries.
The term bourgeois first appeared in the eleventh century to describe a
new addition to the three traditional social ranks of knight (noble),
cleric, and serf. The term initially designated the merchant groups, who
formed new communities or ”bourgs” as bases of operation in or around
the old Roman towns that were governed by the landed nobility. These
men, whose business was long-distance trade and commerce, were at
first highly suspect within traditional medieval society. Clerics
condemned the profits they gained from lending money as immoral
usury, and noblemen viewed their fluid wealth and mobility as politically
disruptive. The merchants in turn resented the laws and customs of
feudal society that gave the nobility and the clergy special privileges.
Town life was often disrupted because regional laws permitted the
nobility and the clergy to live beyond the rules that governed the
activities of everyone else.
Merchants especially wanted an end to the arbitrary tolls and tariffs
imposed by regional magnates over the surrounding countryside. Such
regulations hampered and could even bring to a standstill the flow of
commerce on which both merchants and craftsmen in the growing
urban export industries depended. The townspeople needed simple,
uniform laws and a government sympathetic to their business interests;
they wanted a government in which merchants and craftsmen had a
major voice. That need created internal and external struggles with the
old landed nobility. This basic conflict led towns in the high and late
Middle Ages to form their own independent communes and to ally
themselves with kings against the nobility developments that created a
powerful challenge to feudal society.
Despite unified resistance to external domination, the medieval town
was not an internally harmonious social unit. It was a collection of many
selfish, competitive communities. Only families of long standing and
those who owned property had the full rights of citizenship and a say in
the town’s government. Workers in the same trade lived together on
streets that bore their name, apparently doing so as much to monitor
one another’s business practices as to dwell among peers. Sumptuary
laws regulated not only the dress but even the architecture of the
residences of the various social groups. Merchant guilds appeared in the
eleventh century and were followed in the twelfth by the craft guilds
(organizations of drapers, haberdashers, furriers, hosiers, goldsmiths,
and so on). These organizations existed solely to advance the business
interests of their members and to advance their personal well-being.
They won favorable government policies and served as collection
agencies for the unpaid accounts of individual members. The guilds also
formed distinctive religious confraternities, closeknit associations that
ministered to the needs of member families in both life and death.
The merchants and the stronger craft guilds quickly won a role in town
government. ”New-rich” patricians married into the old nobility and
aped their social customs. Sharing the power of government in the city
councils, the craft guilds used their position in the most selfish way to
limit their membership, to regulate their own wages favorably, and to
establish exacting standards of workmanship so that their products
could not be copied by others. Trademarks first appeared in the twelfth
century. So rigid and exclusive did the dominant guilds become that
they stifled their own creativity and inflamed the journeymen who were
excluded from joining their ranks. In the fourteenth century,
unrepresented artisans and craftsmen, a true urban proletariat
prevented by law from either forming their own guilds or entering the
existing guilds, revolted in a number of places: Florence, Paris, and the
cities of Flanders. Their main opponents were the merchant and craft
guilds, which had themselves risen to prominence by opposing the
antiquated laws and privileges of the old nobility.

HAY UNA IMAGEN:


The vast majority of medieval women were working peasants and
townswomen. This fourteenth century English manuscript shows women
carrying jugs of fresh milk from the sheep pen. [Trustees of the British
Museum.)

HAY UNA IMAGEN:


A medieval shoemaker. Guilds of shoemakers date back to Ancient
Rome. In the Middle Ages most people wore homemade clogs or
wooden shoes. Leather shoes made to order by skilled craftsmen could
be quite costly and elaborate in style and were mostly for the upper
classes. [Vincent Virga Archives.]

Medieval Women
The image and the reality of medieval women are two very different
things. The image, both for contemporaries and for us today, was
strongly influenced by male Christian clergy, whose ideal was the
celibate life of chastity, poverty, and obedience. Drawing on classical,
medical, philosophical, and legal traditions that predated Christianity, as
well as on ancient biblical theology, Christian theologians depicted
women as physically, mentally, and morally weaker than men. On the
basis of such assumptions, medieval church and society sanctioned the
coercive treatment of women, including corrective wife-beating.
Christian clergy generally considered marriage a debased state by
comparison with the religious life, and in their writings they praised
virgins and celibate widows over wives. Women, as the Bible clearly
taught, were the ”weaker vessel.” In marriage, their role was to be
subject and obedient to their husbands, who, as the stronger partners,
had a duty to protect and discipline them.
This image of the medieval woman suggests that she had two basic
options in life: to become either a subjugated housewife or a confined
nun. In reality, the vast majority of medieval women were neither.
Both within and outside Christianity this image of women -not yet to
speak of the reality of their lives- was contradicted. In chivalric
romances and courtly love literature of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, as in the contemporaneous cult of the Virgin Mary, women
were presented as objects of service and devotion to be praised and
admired, even put on pedestals and treated as superior to men. If the
Church shared traditional misogynist sentiments, it also condemned
them, as in the case of the Romance of the Rose (late thirteenth
century) and other popular ”bawdy” literature. The learned churchman
Peter Lombard (1100-1169) sanctioned an image of women that was
often invoked in didactic Christian literature. Why, he asked, was Eve
created from Adam’s rib and not instead taken from his head of his feet?
The answer was clear. God took Eve from Adam’s side because he
wanted woman neither to rule over nor to be enslaved by man, but to
stand squarely at his side, as his cornpanion and partner in mutual aid
and trust. By so insisting on the spiritual equality of men and women
and their shared responsibility to one another within marriage, the
Church also helped to raise the dignity of women.
Women also had basic rights under secular law that prevented them
from being treated as mere chattel. All the major Germanic law codes
recognized the economic freedom of women, that is, their right to
inherit, administer, dispose of, and confer on their children family
property and wealth. They could press charges in court against men for
bodily injury and rape. Depending on the country in question,
punishments for rape ranged from fines, flogging, and banishment to
blinding, castration, and death.
The nunnery was an option for only a very small number of unmarried
women from the uppermost classes. Entrance required a dowry (dos)
and could be almost as expensive as a wedding, although usually it was
less. Within the nunnery, a woman could rise to a position of leadership
as abbess or mother superior and could exercise an organizational and
administrative authority denied her in much of secular life. However,
the nunneries of the established religious orders were also under male
supervision, so that even abbesses had finally to answer to higher male
authority.
Nunneries also provided women an escape from the debilitating effects
of multiple pregnancies. When, in the ninth century, under the influence
of Christianity, the Carolingians made monogamous marriage their
official policy (heretofore they had practiced polygyny and concubinage
and had permitted divorce), it was both a boon and a burden to women.
On the one hand, the selection of a wife now became a very special
event. Wives gained greater dignity and legal security. On the other
hand, a woman’s labor as household manager and the bearer of
children greatly increased. The aristocratic wife not only ran a large
household but was also the agent of her husband during his absence. In
addition to these responsibilities, one wife now had sole responsibility
for the propagation of heirs. Such demands clearly took their toll. The
mortality rates of Frankish women increased and their longevity
decreased after the ninth century. The Carolingian wife also became the
sole object of her husband’s wrath and displeasure. Under such
conditions, the cloister could serve as a welcome refuge to women.
However, the number of women in cloisters was never very great. In
late medieval England, for example, there are estimated to have been
no more than thirtyfive hundred.
The vast majority of medieval women were neither aristocratic
housewives nor nuns, but working women. Every evidence suggests
that they were respected and loved by their husbands, perhaps because
they worked shoulder by shoulder and hour by hour with them. Between
the ages of ten and fifteen, girls were apprenticed in a trade much as
were boys, and they learned to be skilled workers. If they married, they
either continued their particular trade, operating their bakeshops or
dress shops next to their husbands’ businesses, or they became
assistants and partners in the shops of their husbands. Women
appeared in virtually every ”blue-collar” trade, from butchers to
goldsmiths, although they were especially active in the food and
clothing industries. Women belonged to guilds, just like men, and they
became craitmasters. In the later Middle Ages, townswomen
increasingly had the opportunity to go to school and to gain vernacular
literacy.
It is also true that women did not have as wide a range of vocations as
men. They were excluded from the learned professions of scholarship,
medicine, and law. They often found their freedom of movement within
a profession more carefully regulated than a man’s. Usually women
performed the same work as men for a wage 25 per cent lower. And, as
is still true today, they filled the ranks of domestic servants in
disproportionate numbers. Still, women were as prominent and as
creative a part of workaday medieval society as men.

Medieval Children
Historians have found much evidence to suggest that medieval parents
remained emotionally distant from their children, showing them little
interest and affection. Evidence of low parental regard for children
comes from a variety of sources. First, the art and sculpture of the
Middle Ages rarely portray children as distinct from adults; pictorially,
children and adults look alike. Then, there was high infant and child
mortality, which could only have made emotional investment in children
risky. How could a medieval parent, knowing that a child had a 30-50
per cent chance of dying before age five, dare become too emotionally
attached?
Also, during the Middle Ages, children directly assumed adult
responsibilities. The children of peasants became laborers in the fields
alongside their parents as soon as they could physically manage the
work. Urban artisans and burghers sent their children out of their homes
to apprentice in various crafts and trades between the ages of eight and
twelve. In many, perhaps most, instances a child was placed in the
home of a known relative or friend, but often he or she ended up with a
mere acquaintance, even a complete stranger. That children were
expected to grow up fast in the Middle Ages is also suggested by the
canonical ages for marriage: twelve for girls and fourteen for boys.
Infanticide is an even more striking indication of low esteem for
children. The ancient Romans exposed unwanted children at birth. In
this way they regulated family size, though the surviving children
appear to have been given both attention and affection. The Germanic
tribes of medieval Europe, by contrast, had large families but tended to
neglect their children. Infanticide appears to have been directed
primarily against girls. Early medieval penance books and church
synods condemned the practice outright and also forbade parents to
sleep with infants and small children, as tins became an occasion and
an excuse (alleged accidental suffocation) for killing them.
Also, among the German tribes one paid a much lower wergild, or fine,
for injury to a child than for injury to an adult. The wergild for injuring a
child was only one fifth that for injuring an adult. That paid for injury to
a female child under fifteen was one half that for injury to a male child-a
strong indication that female children were the least esteemed
members of German tribal society. Mothers appear also to have nursed
boys longer than they did girls, which favored boys’ health and survival.
However, a woman’s wergild increased a full eightfold between infancy
and her childbearing years, at which time she had obviously become
highly prized.(Reference: 3 David HerlOiy, ”Medieval Children,” iu
Essays on Medieval Civilization, ed. by B. K. Lackner and K. R. Phelp
(University of Texas Press, 1978), pp. 109-131.)
Despite such varied evidence of parental neglect of children, there is
another side to the story. Since the early Middle Ages, physicians and
theologians, at least, have clearly understood childhood to be a distinct
and special stage of life. Isidore of Seville (560-
636), the metropolitan of Seville and a leading intellectual authority
throughout the Middle Ages, carefully distinguished six ages of life, the
first four of which were infancy (between one and seven years of age),
childhood (seven to fourteen), adolescence, and youth. According to the
medical authorities, infancy proper extended from birth to anywhere
between six months and two years (depending on the authority) and
covered the period of speechlessness and suckling. The period
thereafter, until age seven, was considered a higher level of infancy,
marked by the beginning of a child’s ability to speak and his or her
weaning. At age seven, when a child could think and act decisively and
speak clearly, childhood proper began. After this point, a child could be
reasoned with, could profit from regular discipline, and could begin to
train for a lifelong vocation. At seven a child was ready for schooling,
private tutoring, or an apprenticeship in a chosen craft or trade. Until
physical growth was completed, however -and that could extend to
twenty-one years of age-a child or youth was legally under the
guardianship of parents or a surrogate authority.
There is evidence that high infant and child mortality, rather than
distancing parents from children, actually made parents look on them as
all the more precious. The medical authorities of the Middle Ages were
those of antiquity -Hippocrates, Galen, and Soranus of Ephesus. They
dealt at length with postnatal care and childhood diseases. Both in
learned and popular medicine, sensible as well as fanciful cures can be
found for the leading killers of children (diarrhea, worms, pneumonia,
and fever). When infants and children died, medieval parents grieved as
pitiably as modern parents do. In the art and literature of the Middle
Ages, we find mothers baptizing dead infants and children or carrying
them to pilgrim shrines in the hope of reviving them. There are also
examples of mental illness and suicide brought on by the death of a
child.(Reference: Klaus Arnold, Kind and Gesellschaft im Mittelalter and
Renaissance (Paderbom, 1980), pp. 31, 37.)
We also find a variety of children’s toys, even devices like walkers and
potty chairs, clear evidence of special attention being paid to children.
The medieval authorities on child rearing widely condemned child abuse
and urged moderation in the disciplining of children. In church art and
drama, parents were urged to love their children as Mary loved Jesus. By
the high Middle Ages, if not earlier, children were widely viewed as
special creatures with their own needs and possessed of their own
rights.

HAY UNA IMAGEN:


Children watching a puppet show. [Trustees of the British Museum.]

Politics
England and France: Hastings (1066) to Bouvines (1214)

WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. The most important change in English


political life was occasioned in1066 by the death of the childless Anglo-
Saxon ruler Edward the Confessor, so-named because of his reputation
of piety. Edward’s mother was a Norman princess, and this fact gave the
duke of Normandy a hereditary claim to the English throne. Before his
death, Edward, who was not a strong ruler, acknowledged this claim and
even directed that his throne be given to William of Normandy (d.
1087). But the Anglo-Saxon assembly, which customarily bestowed the
royal power, had a mind of its own and vetoed Edward’s last wishes. It
chose instead Harold Godwinsson. This defiant action brought the swift
conquest of England by the powerful Normans. William’s forces defeated
Harold’s army at Hastings on October 14, 1066. Within weeks of the
invasion, William was crowned king of England in Westminster Abbey,
both by right of heredity and by right of conquest.
The Norman king thoroughly subjected his noble vassals to the crown,
yet he also consulted with them regularly about decisions of ”state.”
The result was a unique blending of the ”one” and the ”many,” a
balance between monarchical and parliamentary elements that has
ever since characterized English government.
For the purposes of administration and taxation, William commissioned
a county-by-county survey of his new realm, a detailed accounting
known as the Domesday Book (1080-1086). The title of the book reflects
the thoroughness of the survey: just as none would escape the
doomsday judgment of God, so none was overlooked by William’s
assessors.
HENRY II. William’s son, Henry I (ruled 1100-1135), died without a male
heir, throwing England into virtual anarchy until Henry II (1154-1189)
mounted the throne as head of the new Plantagenet dynasty. Henry
brought to the throne greatly expanded French holdings, partly by
inheritance from his father (Burgundy and Anjou) and partly by his
marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204), a union that created the
so-called Angevin or English-French empire. Eleanor married Henry
while he was still the count of Anjou and not yet king of England. The
marriage occurred only eight weeks after the annulment of Eleanor’s
fifteen-year marriage to the ascetic French king Louis VII in March 1152.
Although the annulment was granted on grounds of consanguinity
(blood relationship), the true reason for the dissolution of the marriage
was Louis’ suspicion of infidelity (according to rumor, Eleanor had been
intimate with her cousin). The annulment was very costly to Louis, who
lost Aquitaine together with his wife. Eleanor bore Henry eight children,
five of them sons, among them the future kings Richard the Lion-
Hearted and John. Not only did England, under Henry, come to control
most of the coast of France, but Henry also conquered a part of Ireland
and made the king of Scotland his vassal.
The French king, Louis VII, who had lost both his wife and considerable
French land to Henry, saw a mortal threat to France in this English
expansion. He responded by adopting what came to be a permanent
French policy of containment and expulsion of the English from their
continental holdings in France -a policy that did not finally succeed until
the mid-fifteenth century, when English power on the Continent
collapsed at the conclusion of the Hundred Years’ War.

POPULAR REBELLION AND MAGNA CARTA. As Henry II acquired new


lands abroad, he became more autocratic at home. He forced his will on
the clergy in the Constitutions of Clarendon (1164), measures that
placed limitations on judicial appeals to Rome; subjected the clergy to
the civil courts; and gave the king control over the election of bishops.
The result was strong political resistance from both the nobility and the
clergy. The archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas a Becket (CA. 1118-
1170), once Henry’s compliant chancellor, broke openly with the king
and fled to Louis VII. Becket’s subsequent assassination in
1170 and his canonization by Pope Alexander in at the altar in 1172
forced the king to retreat from his heavyhanded tactics, as popular
resentment grew.
English resistance to the king became outright rebellion under Henry’s
successors, the brothers Richard the Lion-Hearted (1189-1199) and John
(1199-1216). Their burdensome taxation in support of unnecessary
foreign Crusades and a failing war with France left the English people
little alternative. In 1209, Pope Innocent in excommunicated King John
and placed England under interdict. This humiliating experience saw the
king of England declare his country a fief of the pope. But it was the
defeat of the English by the French at Bouvines in 1214 that proved the
last straw. With the full support of the clergy and the townspeople, the
English barons revolted against John. The popular rebellion ended with
the king’s grudging recognition of Magna Carta (”Great Charter”) in
1215.
This monumental document was a victory of feudal over monarchical
power in the sense that it secured the rights of the many -the nobility,
the clergy, and the townspeople- over the autocratic king; it restored
the internal balance of power that had been the English political
experience since the Norman Conquest. The English people -at least the
privileged English people- thereby preserved their right to be
represented at the highest levels of government, especially in matters
of taxation. The monarchy remained intact, however, and its legitimate
powers and rights were duly recognized and preserved. This outcome
contrasted with the experience on the Continent, where victorious
nobility tended to humiliate kings and emperors and undo all efforts at
centralization.
With a peculiar political genius, the English consistently refused to
tolerate either the absorption of the power of the monarchy by the
nobility or the abridgment of the rights of the nobility by the monarchy.
Although King John continued to resist the Great Charter in every way
he could, his son Henry III formally ratified it, and it has ever since
remained a cornerstone of English law.
PHILIP II AUGUSTUS. During the century and a half between the Norman
Conquest (1066) and Magna Carta (1215), a strong monarchy was never
in question in England. The English struggle in the high Middle Ages was
to secure the rights of the many, not the authority of the king. The
French faced the reverse problem in this period. Powerful feudal princes
dominated France for two centuries, from the beginning of the Capetian
dynasty (987) until the reign of Philip II Augustus (1180-1223). During
this period, the Capetian kings wisely concentrated their limited
resources on securing the royal domain, their uncontested territory
round about Paris known as the Ile-de-France. They did not rashly
challenge the more powerful nobility. Aggressively exercising their
feudal rights in this area, they secured absolute obedience and a solid
base of power. By the time of Philip II, Paris had become the center of
French government and culture, and the Capetian dynasty a secure
hereditary monarchy. Thereafter, the kings of France were in a position
to impose their will on the French nobles, who were always in law, if not
in political fact, the king’s sworn vassals.
The Norman conquest of England helped stir France to unity and make it
possible for the Capetian kings to establish a truly national monarchy.
The duke of Normandy, who after 1066 was master of the whole of
England, was also among the vassals of the French king in Paris.
Capetian kings understandably watched with alarm as the power of
their Norman vassal grew.
Philip Augustus faced, at the same time, an internal and an international
struggle, and he was successful in both. His armies occupied all the
English territories on the French coast, with the exception of Aquitaine.
As the showdown with the English neared on the Continent, however,
the Holy Roman Emperor Otto IV (1198-1215) entered the fray on the
side of the English, and the French found themselves assailed from both
east and west. But when the international armies finally clashed at
Bouvines on July 27, 1214, in what became the first great European
battle in history, the French won handily over the English and the
Germans. This victory unified France around the monarchy and thereby
laid the foundation for French ascendancy in the later Middle Ages.
Philip Augustus also gained control of the lucrative urban industries of
Flanders. The defeat so weakened Otto IV that he fell from power in
Germany.

The Hohenstaufen Empire (1152-1272)


During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, stable governments
developed in both England and France. In England, Magna Carta
balanced the rights of die nobility against the authority of the king, and
in France, the reign of Philip II Augustus secured the authority of the
king over the competitive claims of the nobility. The experience within
the Holy Roman Empire, which embraced Germany, Burgundy, and
northern Italy by the mid-thirteenth century, was a very different story.
There, primarily because of the efforts of the Hohenstaufen dynasty to
extend imperial power into southern Italy, disunity and blood feuding
remained the order of the day for two centuries and left as a legacy the
fragmentation of Germany until modern times.

HAY UNA IMAGEN:


Beginning in the mid-twelfth century, the Gothic style evolved from
Romanesque architecture. The term itself was at first pejorative: it
meant ”barbaric” and was applied to the new style by its critics. Gothic
was also often known in the Middle Ages as the ”French style” because
of its unusual popularity in France. Its most distinctive visible features
are its ribbed, criss-crossing vaulting, its pointed arches rather than
rounded ones and its frequent exterior buttresses. The result gives an
essential impression of vertical lines. The vaulting made possible more
height than the Romanesque style had sought, while the extensive
addition of ”flying’ buttresses made even greater height possible.
Because walls, therefore, did not have to carry all of a structure’s
weight, wide expanses of windows were possible-hence the extensive
use of stained glass and the characteristic color that often floods Gothic
cathedrals. Use of the windows to show stories from the Bible, saints’
lives, and local events was similar to earlier use of mosaics.
This diagram shows the typical vaulting arches, and buttresses of a
Gothic building. [World Architecture, Trewin Copplcstone, General Editor
(London: Harnlyn, 1963), p. 216.]

FREDERICK I BARBAROSSA. The investiture struggle had earlier


weakened imperial authority. A new day seemed to dawn for imperial
power with the accession to the throne of Frederick I Barbarossa (1152-
1190), the first of the Hohenstaufens, the successor dynasty within the
empire to the Franks and the Ottomans. The Hohenstaufens not only
reestablished imperial authority but also initiated a new phrase in the
contest between popes and emperors, one that was to prove even more
deadly than the investiture struggle had been. Never have kings and
popes despised and persecuted one another more than during the
Hohenstaufen dynasty. As Frederick I surveyed his empire, he saw
powerful feudal princes in Germany and Lombardy and a pope in Rome
who believed that the emperor was his creature. There existed,
however, widespread disaffection with the incessant feudal strife of the
princes and the turmoil caused by the theocratic pretensions of the
papacy. Popular opinion was on the emperor’s side. Thus, Frederick had
a foundation on which to rebuild imperial authority, and he shrewdly
took advantage of it. Switzerland became Frederick’s base of operation.
From there he attempted to hold the empire together by stressing
feudal bonds.
HAY UNA IMAGEN:
Salisbury cathedral, built 1220-1165, an example of English Gothic.
Note the flying buttresses, which permit greater height, and the soaring
towers and spire. [British Tourist Authority, New York.]

HENRY VI AND THE SICILIAN CONNECTION.


Frederick’s reign ended with stalemate in Germany and defeat in Italy.
Before his death in 1190, an opportunity had opened to form a new
territorial base of power for future emperors when the Norman ruler of
the kingdom of Sicily, William II (1166-1189) sought an alliance with
Frederick that would free him to pursue a scheme to conquer
Constantinople. The alliance was sealed in 1186 by a most fateful
marriage between Frederick’s son -the future Henry VI (1190-1197)- and
Constance, heiress to the kingdom of Sicily. This alliance proved,
however, to be only another well-laid political plan that went astray. The
Sicilian connection became a fatal distraction for Hohenstaufen kings,
leading them repeatedly to sacrifice their traditional territorial base in
northern Europe to the temptation of imperialism. Equally ominous, this
union of the empire with Sicily left Rome encircled, thereby ensuring the
undying hostility of a papacy already thoroughly distrustful of the
emperor. The marriage alliance with Sicily proved to be the first step in
what soon became a fight to the death between pope and emperor.
Henry VI died in September 1197, with chaos his immediate heir.
Between English intervention in its politics and the pope’s deliberate
efforts to sabotage the Hohenstaufen dynasty, Germany was thrown
into anarchy and civil war. England gave financial support to anti-
Hohenstaufen factions. Its candidate for the imperial throne, Otto of
Brunswick of the rival Welf dynasty, was crowned Otto IV by his
supporters in Aachen in 1198 and later won general recognition in
Germany. With England supporting Otto, the French rushed in on the
side of the fallen Hohenstaufen -the beginning of periodic French fishing
in troubled German waters. Meanwhile, Hemy VI’s four-year-old son,
Frederick, was safely tucked away as a ward of Pope Innocent UI (1198-
1215).
Hohenstaufen support remained alive in Germany, however, and Otto
reigned over a very divided kingdom. In October 1209, Pope Innocent
crowned him emperor. But the pope quickly changed from benefactor to
mortal enemy when, after his coronation, Otto proceeded to reconquer
Sicily and once again pursue an imperial policy that left Rome encircled.
Within four months of his papal coronation, Otto received a papal
excommunication.

HAY UN MAPA:
MAP 14-3 GERMANY AND ITALY IN THE MIDDLE AGES Medieval
Germany and Italy were divided lands. The Holy Roman Empire
(Germany) embraced hundreds of independent territories that the
emperor ruled only in name. The papacy controlled the Rome area and
tried to enforce its will on Rornagna. Under the Hohenstaufens (mid-
12th to mid-13th century), internal German divisions and papal conflict
reached new heights; German rulers sought to extend their power to
southern Italy and Sicily.

FREDERICK II.
Pope Innocent, casting about for a counterweight to the treacherous
Otto, joined the French, who had remained loyal to the Hohenstaufens
against the English-Welf alliance. His new ally, Philip Augustus,
impressed on Innocent the fact that a solution to their problems with
Otto IV lay near at hand in Innocent’s ward, Frederick of Sicily. Frederick,
the son of the late Hohenstaufen Emperor Henry VI, was now of age
and, unlike Otto, had an immediate hereditary claim to the imperial
throne. In December 1212, the young Frederick, with papal, French, and
German support, was crowned king of the Romans in Mainz, as Frederick
II. Within a year and a half, Philip Augustus ended the Welf interregnum
of Otto IV on the battlefield of Bouvines. Philip sent Frederick II Otto’s
fallen imperial banner from the battlefield, a bold gesture that suggests
the extent to which Frederick’s ascent to the throne was intended to be
that of a French-papal puppet.
He soon disappointed any such hopes. Frederick was Sicilian and
dreaded travel beyond the Alps. Only nine of his thirty-eight years as
emperor were spent in Germany. Although Frederick continued to
pursue royal policies in Germany through his representatives, he
desired only one thing from the German princes, the imperial tide for
himself and his sons, and he was willing to give them what they wanted
to secure it. His eager compliance with their demands laid the
foundation for six centuries of German division. In 1220 he recognized
the jurisdictional claims of the ecclesiastical princes of Germany, and in
1232 he extended the same recognition to the secular princes. The
German princes were undisputed lords over their territories. Frederick’s
concessions have been characterized as a German equivalent to Magna
Carta in the sense that they secured the rights of the German nobility.
Unlike Magna Carta, however, they did so without at the same time
securing the rights of monarchy. Magna Carta placed the king and the
nobility (parliament) in England in a creative tension; the reign of
Frederick II simply made the German nobility petty kings.
Frederick had an equally disastrous relationship with the pope, who
excommunicated him no fewer than four times. The pope won the long
struggle that ensued, although his victory proved in time to be a Pyrrhic
one. In the contest with Frederick II, Pope Innocent IV (1243-1254)
launched the church into European politics on a massive scale, and his
wholesale secularization of the papacy made the Church highly
vulnerable to the criticism of religious reformers and royal apologists.
Innocent organized and led the German princes against Frederick. These
princes-thanksto Frederick’s grand concessions to them- had become a
superior force and were in full control of Germany by the 1240s.
When Frederick died in 1250, the German monarchy died with him. The
princes established an informal electoral college in 1257, which
thereafter reigned supreme (it was formally recognized by the emperor
in 1356). The ”king of the Romans” became their puppet, this time with
firmly attached strings; he was elected and did not rule by hereditary
right. Between 1250 and1272, the Hohenstaufen dynasty slowly faded
into oblivion.
Independent princes now controlled Germany. Italy fell to local
magnates. The connection between Germany and Sicily, established by
Frederick I, was permanently broken. And the papal monarchy emerged
as one of Europe’s most formidable powers, soon to enter its most
costly conflict with the French and the English.

The Rise of Russia


Early in the ninth century, missionaries from Byzantium had converted
Russia to the Christianity of the Eastern Orthodox Church. This
development meant that Russia would remain culturally separated from
the Latin Christianity of Western Europe. Between the late ninth century
and the mid-thirteenth century, the city of Kiev was the center of
Russian political life. Although the city enjoyed fairly extensive trade
relations with its neighbors, it failed to develop a political system that
provided effective resistance to foreign domination.
The external threat to Kievan Russia came from the east when the
Mongols moved across the vast Eurasian plains and into Russia as
Genghis Khan built his empire. By 1240, the Mongols had conquered
most of Russia and had turned its various cities and their surrounding
countryside into dependent principalities from which tribute could be
exacted. The portion of the Mongol Empire to which Russia thus stood in
the relationship of a vassal was called the Golden Horde. It included the
steppe, in what is now south Russia, with its largely nomadic population.
This vassal relationship encouraged an Eastern orientation on the part
of the Russians for over two centuries, although the connection of the
Russian church to the Byzantine Empire remained important. During this
period there was no single central political authority in Russia. The land
was divided into numerous feudal principalities, each of which was
militarily weak and subject in one degree or another to the Golden
Horde.
The rise of Moscow as a relatively strong power eventually brought the
feudal age of Russian history to an end. In the fourteenth century, under
Grand Prince Ivan I, the city began to cooperate with its Mongol -or as
the Russians called them, Tatar- overlords in the collection of tribute.
Ivan kept much of this tribute to himself and was soon called Ivan Kalita,
or John of the Moneybag. When Mongol authority began to weaken, the
princes of Moscow, who had become increasingly wealthy, filled the
political power vacuum in the territory near the city. The princes
extended their authority and that of the city by purchasing some
territory, colonizing other areas, and conquering new lands. This slow
extension of the principality of Moscow is usually known as gathering
the Russian land. In 1380, Grand Prince Dmitry of Moscow defeated the
Mongols in battle. The result was not militarily decisive, but Moscow had
demonstrated that the Mongol armies were not invincible. Conflict with
the Mongols continued for another century before they were driven out.
During these years, the princes of Moscow asserted their right to be
regarded as the successors of the earlier Kievan rulers, and they also
made Moscow the religious center of Russia.

France in the Thirteenth Century: The Reign of Louis IX


If Innocent III realized the fondest ambitions of medieval popes, Louis IX
(1226-1270), the grandson of Philip Augustus, embodied the medieval
view of the perfect ruler. His reign was a striking contrast to that of his
contemporary, Frederick II of Germany. Coming to power in the wake of
the French victory at Bouvines (1214), Louis inherited a unified and
secure kingdom. Although he was also endowed with a moral character
that far excelled that of his royal and papal contemporaries, he was also
at times prey to naivete. Not beset by the problems of sheer survival,
and a reformer at heart, Louis found himself free to concentrate on what
medieval people believed to be the business of civilization.
Magnanimity in politics is not always a sign of strength and Louis could
be very magnanimous. Although in a position to drive the English from
their French possessions during negotiations for the Treaty of Paris
(1259), he refused to take such advantage. Had he done so and
ruthlessly confiscated English territories on the French coast, he might
have lessened, if not averted altogether, the conflict of the Hundred
Years’ War (CA. 1337-453).
Although he occasionally chastised popes for their crude ambitions,
Louis remained neutral during the long struggle between Frederick II
and the papacy, and his neutrality redounded very much to die pope’s
advantage. For their assistance, both by action and by inaction, the
Capetian kings of the thirteenth century became the objects of many
papal favors.
Louis’ greatest achievements lay at home. The efficient French
bureaucracy, which his predecessors had used to exploit their subjects,
became under Louis an instrument of order and fair play in local
government. He sent forth royal commissioners (enqueteurs),
reminiscent of Charlemagne’s far less successful missi dominici, to
monitor the royal officials responsible for local governmental
administration. These royal ambassadors were received as genuine
tributes of the people. Louis further abolished private wars and serfdom
within his royal domain, gave his subjects the judicial right of appeal
from local to higher courts, and made the tax system, by medieval
standards, more equitable. The French people came to associate their
king with justice, and national feeling, the glue of nationhood, grew very
strong during his reign.
Respected by the kings of Europe, Louis became an arbiter among the
world’s powers, having far greater moral authority man the pope.
During his reign, French society and culture became an example to all of
Europe, a pattern that would continue into the modern period. Northern
France became the showcase of monastic reform, chivalry, and Gothic
art and architecture. Louis’ reign also coincided with the golden age of
Scholasticism, which saw the convergence of Europe’s greatest thinkers
on Paris, among them Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Bonaventure.
Louis’ perfection remained, however, that of a medieval king. Like his
father, Louis VI11 (1223-1226), Louis was something of a religious
fanatic. He sponsored the French Inquisition. He led two French
Crusades against the Arabs, which were inspired by the purest religious
motives but proved to be personal disasters. During the first (1248-
1254), Louis was captured and had to be ransomed out of Egypt. He
died of a fever during the second in 1270. It was especially for this
selfless, but also quite useless, service on behalf of the Church that
Louis IX later received the rare honor of sainthood.

HAY UNA IMAGEN:


King Louis IX of France, shown in a thirteenth-century manuscript, riding
off on a crusade with his knights and priests, as monks bless and bid
him farewell. [Royal MS.
16G. VI, f. 404v. Reproduced by permission of the British Library Board,
London.]

The High Middle Ages in World Perspective


With its borders finally secured, Western Europe concentrated during
the high Middle Ages on its political institutions and cultural
development, something denied it during the early Middle Ages. In
England and France, Modern Western nations can be seen in formation.
Within the empire, there was both revival (under Otto I) and total
collapse (during the Hohenstaufen dynasty) of imperial rule.
Everywhere, society successfully organized itself from noble to serf.
With the flourishing of trade and the expansion of towns, a new wealthy
class patronized education. Western Europe’s first universities appeared
and a movement called Scholasticism brought a new, and often
forbidding, order to knowledge. The major disruption of the period,
however, was an unprecedented conflict between former allies. The
Roman Catholic church had become a monarchy in its own right, able to
compete with secular states and even to dethrone (by excommunication
and interdict) kings and princes. The foundation was thereby laid both
for perpetual conflict between popes and rulers, which lasted well into
early modern times, and for the creation of the peculiar Western
separation of Church and State.
For Western Europe, the high Middle Ages were a period of clearer self-
definition during which the West gained much of the shape we have
come to recognize today. Other world civilizations had already become
established and were beginning to depart their ”classical” or ”golden”
periods. The best lay behind rather than before them.
Under the Sung dynasty (960-1279) before Mongol rule, China
continued its technological advance. In addition to printing, the Chinese
invented the abacus and gunpowder. They also enjoyed a money
economy unknown in the West. But culturally, these centuries between
1000 and 1300 were closed and narrow by comparison with those of the
T’ang Dynasty. Politically, the Sung was far more autocratic. In China (as
also in West European lands like England and France, although not in
Italy and the empire), regional aristocracies ceased to be serious
obstacles to a strong centralized government.
Chinese women generally held a lower status and had fewer vocational
options than in the West, as the practice of footbinding dramatically
attests. As in the West, a higher degree of freedom and self-government
developed in the countryside, especially by the fourteenth century, as
peasants gained the right to buy and sell land and to fulfill traditional
labor obligations by money payments. Intellectually, China, like the
West, had a scholastic movement within its dominant philosophy;
Confucianism made religious and philosophical thought more elaborate,
systematic, and orthodox. Whereas Western scholasticism had the effect
of making Christianity aloof, elitist, and ridiculed by its lay critics,
Confucianism remained a philosophy highly adaptable and popular
among lay people.
In the late twelfth century, Japan shifted from civilian to military rule;
the Kamakura Bakufu governed by mounted warriors who were paid
with rights to income from land in exchange for their military services.
This rise of a military aristocracy marks the beginning of Japan’s
”medieval,” as distinct from its ”classical” period. Three Mongol
invasions in die thirteenth century also required a strong military. With a
civilian court also in existence, Japan actually had a dual government
(that is, two emperors and two courts) until the fourteenth century.
However, this situation differed greatly from the deep and permanent
national divisions developing at this time among the emerging states
and autonomous principalities of Western Europe.
Japanese women, more like those in Western Europe than in China,
traditionally played a prominent role in royal government and court
culture. Nun Shogun, for example, succeeded her husband for a brief
period of Kamatura rule in the late twelfth century. But the prominence
of women in government would also change in Japan by the fourteenth
century.
Within the many developing autonomous Islamic lands at this time, the
teaching of Muhammad had created an international culture. The
regular practice of religious fundamentals made it possible for Muslims
to transcend their new and often very deep regional divisions. Similarly,
Christianity made it possible for Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, and
Italians to think of themselves as one people and unite in Crusades to
the Holy Land. As these Crusades began in the late eleventh century,
Islam too was on the march, penetrating Turkey and Afghanistan, and
impinging upon India, where it gained a new challenge in Hinduism.

OLGA: HABIA UNA LISTA DE SUGGESTED READINGS ACA QUE LA SAQUE.

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